Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont is calling for a complete ban on the use of facial recognition by law enforcement as part of the new criminal justice reform plan he introduced this weekend, ahead of his two-day tour of South Carolina.
While other politicians and presidential candidates have also expressed concerns about facial recognition software and how it’s been used, Sanders is the first to specifically call for a ban. He posted his thoughts on facial recognition as well as criminal justice as a whole on his website.
Last year, candidates Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) and Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) joined others in a letter to the FTC expressing concern over the technology. In that letter, the senators said they were concerned by the mounting evidence that these technologies can perpetuate gender, racial, age, and other biases. As a result, their use may violate civil rights laws and could be unfair and deceptive,” the letter reads.
The letter specifically points to MIT research that shows that facial recognition algorithms are 30% more likely to misidentify dark-skinned women than they are lighter-skinned men. It also referenced an ACLU experiment in which the technology had incorrectly identified 28 members of Congress as people with previous arrests, disproportionately African American and Latino members.
In addition to a ban on facial recognition, Sander’s criminal justice reform plan also asks for a ban on for-profit prisons as well as removes the ability for law enforcement agencies to benefit from civil asset forfeitures.
Last month, a digital rights group, Fight for the Future, made a similar call for a ban on the use of facial recognition software. In its campaign, the group said that “Facial recognition surveillance technology is unreliable, biased, and a threat to basic rights and safety.”
According to Fight for the Future, reports have shown that 98% of the time facial recognition programs identify the wrong individual — those aren’t exactly good odds. The group warns that an incorrect identification could potentially mean that someone is identified and charged with a crime they did not commit.
San Francisco and Sommerville, Massachusetts, have banned the use of facial recognition by police and public agencies.
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.
Military working dogs charge into places the rest of us would flee. So, I understand why anyone would want to breed tougher, healthier dogs for the job.
Warhound, a new startup from Colossal Biosciences co-founder Ben Lamm and Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey, has stepped out of stealth with $200 million to clone and gene-edit working dogs for American troops, police departments, and emergency services (via TechCrunch).
AI can describe a picture, identify objects, and answer questions about what a camera sees. But when a blind user needs a quick answer, getting an entire spoken essay about the scene isn't exactly helpful. Researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD) have found that AI-powered visual assistance can leave blind users doing too much work to get the information they actually need.
The study, titled Say It My Way: Exploring Control in Conversational Visual Question Answering with Blind Users, examined how people interact with Be My AI, an AI-powered feature of the Be My Eyes app. The researchers found that users often received lengthy descriptions that didn't adequately address their immediate goals, forcing them to ask follow-up questions or find ways to steer the AI towards a more useful answer.